The Office

Workcations: Sad Trend, or Awesome Concept?

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday listed the pros and cons of a new trend among worker drones: the “workcation,” which is like a vacation, but with work involved.

Instead of taking actual time off from work—no e-mails, no conference calls, nothing work-related of any sort—workers who want to travel without dipping into their vacation days are now supposedly opting to work on the road. Several of the workers quoted in the article explained their preferences for workcations, saying they liked the change of scenery and the ability to simultaneously work and do fun stuff. One entrepreneur admitted that she took calls at the beach, while another bragged about her ability to work from Puerto Rico for an entire week.

While the Journal didn’t include many convincing statistics to suggest that workcations are on the rise, they did note that regular vacation time was falling across America: a report from the U.S. Travel Association’s Project: Time Off indicates that in 2013, workers only took an average of 16 vacation days per year, whereas in 2000, they would take 20.9 days.

Sadly, workers at, say, a ketchup-bottling factory won’t be able to take “workcation” because they’re tied to a physical location. And even if the job allows for remote working, sometimes “workcations” are bad, as this man inadvertently demonstrates:

For Bill Raymond, Disney World proved an ideal workcation destination.
In February, Mr. Raymond and his wife flew from their suburban Boston
home to Orlando, where they spent a couple of days touring the theme
park.

For the next two days, Mr. Raymond, a solutions architect at
enterprise search firm Voyager Search, clocked full workdays from the
Orlando resort, hunkering down with his laptop and taking sales calls
by the pool.

Mr. Raymond even wrote a post on his personal blog with tips on how to
be a productive “workcationer” at Disney, pinpointing locations at the
resort that offer fewer distractions. (Among his top picks were the
pool at the Disney Port Orleans French Quarter resort, which he says
wasn’t “overrun with kids being kids.”)

Disneyland?! Workcationing at the Happiest Place on Earth™? Who is this man, the distant father from Mary Poppins? We hope Raymond has a daughter who met a magical friend, and they helped him rediscover his love of family and childlike sense of wonder.

And things like pulling full workdays at Disneyland could lead to burnout, said several experts quoted by the Journal. As Deborah Good of the University of Pittsburgh noted, “there may be a backlash among employees if they feel they must work all the time and can’t ever have a real vacation.”

In summation: workcations can be fine and helpful to workers, if handled properly, and the only truly offensive thing about the concept is its dumb portmanteau name. (Look, just call it “working remotely." It's a perfectly accurate, not-dumb name.)